How Inadequate Follow-Up Treatment Can Cause Patient Harm
After seeking out diagnostic results for your health, you expect your doctor to call or contact you about your treatment options. However, you may have never received a response and assumed everything was fine. Unfortunately, when you find out later that there was a serious problem your doctor failed to follow up on, things can rapidly change.
Failure to contact you about further treatment can lead to serious health consequences. In fact, without proper treatment, many serious conditions that would have been less severe if caught earlier become much more dangerous. Unfortunately, this can lead to medical malpractice, harm, and even death for the patient. A medical malpractice attorney in Portland can help you assess your options if you or a loved one are harmed.
Inadequate Follow-Up Treatment Can Have Deadly Consequences for Patients
Inadequate follow-up treatment refers to any cases where a doctor or patient fails to follow up on treatment, diagnosis, or aftercare. When this happens, it can have extreme negative consequences for the patient. Unfortunately, some of these impacts can turn deadly.
A review published in the National Library of Medicine refers to a 20-year collection of studies on the failure to follow up on hospital patients’ test results. These reviews found that 20 to 61% of hospitalized inpatients experienced a lack of follow-up care for test results. This lack of care can impact cancer diagnoses, antibiotic therapy, and urgent issues like osteoporosis.
Reviews of ongoing tests like these show that a significant number of test results and diagnoses are not being followed up on. For conditions like cancer, which can be treated in some cases if acted on early, this can turn into a deadly problem. In some cases, this becomes grounds for a medical malpractice claim.
Common Causes of Follow-Up Failures
Failure to provide follow-up care can happen for many reasons. In some cases, failure to communicate or to comply with medical instructions, whether by the doctor or the patient, can lead to issues with diagnosis and care. Below are a few of the most common examples you may face:
- The patient failed to comply with follow-up calls, appointments, and treatment
- The doctor failed to contact patients after a missed appointment
- Incomplete aftercare caused by a failure to track follow-up needs
- Failure to follow up with new medications or new diagnoses
- Failure to order lab tests or notify about test results
- Failure to communicate the urgency of the medical care needed
In some cases, communication errors or failure to comply are issues on the part of the patient. In these cases, the patient may be considered responsible for the negative outcomes they received. However, many of these cases involve failures on the part of the doctors, and that can potentially lead to a medical malpractice claim if the medical professional in question was negligent with your safety.
Seek Help When a Failure in Follow-Up Treatment Causes You Harm
If you have suffered harm from inadequate follow-up treatment, you may have grounds to pursue compensation. You should not have to accept the painful results of a medical professional who failed to do their due diligence. In fact, you may have grounds for a lawsuit.
At Paulson Coletti Trial Attorneys PC, we offer legal representation for those injured by a doctor’s failure to follow up, as well as representation for families who lost a loved one for those reasons. We offer free consultations for potential clients so that we can speak about your potential medical malpractice claim and how we can help. To learn more, reach out by calling or filling out our online contact form.